Mastodon Is DDoSing Me | Kev Quirk
Whenever I, or someone else, posts a link to this blog on Mastodon, it DDoS's me and brings the site down for a couple minutes.
Over the last few months, I've noticed that whenever I (or someone else) posts a link to this blog on Mastodon, the decentralised nature of the platforms effectively DDoS's me.
A DDoS is a Distributed Denial of Service, where multiple remote servers all send traffic at the same time, which overwhelms the target. The "target", in this case, is my server. 😢
So when you post a link to an external source to pretty much any social media site, the social site pulls some meta data from the remote site and creates a little card that makes the link look pretty. For this site, it looks something like this:
The social site attempts to pull things like the feature image, post title, description and blog name. If the link is posted to a centralised service, like Facebook or Twitter, it's not a problem as there's only one source requesting that meta data.
As many of us know, Mastodon is decentralised, which means that the network is spread among multiple servers, or instances. So when a link is posted, every instance where you have a follower requests this meta data independently.
